Mrs. Bellington then moved to Richmond, Virginia, where her husband joined them. Eve's son by the uncle grew up to be tall and handsome, dearly beloved by his mother. After a furious quarrel with his uncle-grandfather, he left to seek his fortune in the West. A letter from Silver City, Colorado, was the last Eve ever heard from him. He'd disappeared somewhere in the Rockies, according to a . report sent by a detective.
Her mother had died in a fire, and her father had died of a heart attack while trying to rescue her mother. Eve's first husband died of cholera shortly thereafter, and before she was fifty she had lost two more husbands and six of her ten children.
Her life was that of a heroine of a novel on which Margaret Mitchell and Tennessee Williams might have collaborated. She didn't think it was very funny when Peter had told her that.
After thirty-plus years on The Riverworld, Eve had gotten over her prejudice against niggers and her hatred of bluebellies. She had even fallen in love with a Yankee. Peter had never told her that his great grandfather had been with an Indiana regiment on that "infamous" march with Sherman. He hadn't wanted to strain her affection.
Peter moved on up the line and received the alcohol in his soapstone mug. He mixed one part of alcohol with three parts of water in a bamboo bucket and walked back to talk to Eve, who was still in line. He asked her where she had been all day. She replied that she had been wandering around, thinking.
He didn't ask her what her thoughts had been. He knew. She was trying to think of a way to break off their relationship without pain. They'd been drifting apart for some months, their love suddenly and unaccountably cooled. Peter had done some thinking on this subject himself. But each was waiting for the other to take the initiative.
Peter said he would see her later, and he pushed through the noisy crowd toward Farrington. Rider was on the dance floor, whooping and whirling with Bullitt's woman. Peter waited until the captain was through telling about his adventures in the 1899 Yukon gold rash. Farrington's tale, which involved losing some of his teeth from scurvy, somehow became a hilarious experience.
Peter said, "Mr. Fairington, have you made up your mind yet?"
Farrington paused, his mouth open to launch on another story. His reddened eyes blinked. He said, "Oh, yes! You're... ah ... um ... named Frigate, right? Peter Frigate. The one who's read a lot. Yes, Tom and I've made up our minds. We'll announce our choice some time during the party."
"I hope it's me," Peter said. "I really want to go with you."
"Enthusiasm counts for a great deal,'' Farrington said. "Experience counts for even more. Put the two together, and you have a fine jack-tar."
Peter breathed deeply and took the plunge.
"This uncertainty is getting me down. Could you at least tell me if I've been eliminated? If I have been, I can drown my sorrow."
Farrington smiled. "It really means that much to you? Why?"
"Well, I do want to get to the end of The River."
Farrington cocked his eyebrows. "Yeah? Do you expect to find the answers to all your questions there?"
"I don't want millions, I want answers to my questions," Peter said. "That's a quotation from a character in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov."
Farrington's face lit up.
"That's great! I'd heard of Dostoyevsky but I never had a chance to read him. I don't think there was an English translation of his books in my time. At least, I never ran across any."
"Nietzsche admitted that he'd learned a lot about psychology just from reading the Russian's novels," Peter said.
"Nietzsche, hen? You know him well?"
"I've read him in both English and German. He was a great poet, the only German philosopher who could write in anything but waterlogged prose. Well, that's not fair, Schopenhauer could write stuff that wouldn't put you to sleep or give you a nervous breakdown while you were waiting for the sentence to end. I don't go along with Nietzsche's conception of the Ubermensch, though. Man is a rope across an abyss between animal and superman. That may not be the exact quotation; it's been a hell of a long time since I read Thus Spake Zarathustra.
"Anyway, I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I'm thinking of isn't Nietzsche's. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and.psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.
"Now, you take the Nietzschean concept of the superman as embodied in Jack London's novel The Sea Wolf."
Peter paused, then said, "Have you read it?"
Farrington grinned. "Many times. What about Wolf Larsen?"
"I think he was more London's superman than Nietzsche's. He was London's idea of what the superman ought to be. Nietzsche would have been appalled by Larsen's brutality. However, London did kill him off with a brain tumor. And I suppose that London meant to show by this that there was something inherently rotten about Larsen as superman. Maybe he meant to tell the reader that. If he did, it went over the heads of most of the literary critics. They never got the significance of Larsen's manner of death. Then, too, I think London was also showing that man, even superman, has his roots in his animal nature. He's part of Nature, and no matter what his mental attainments, no matter how much he defies Nature, he can't escape the physical facts. He is an animal, and so he's subject to disease, such as brain tumors. How are the mighty fallen. ,
"But I think that Wolf Larsen was also, in some respects, what Jack London would have liked to be. London lived in a brutal world, and he thought that he had to be a superbrute to survive. Yet, London had empathy; he knew what it was to be one of the people of the abyss. He thought that the masses could find relief from their sufferings, and realize their human potential, through socialism. He fought for it all his life. At the same time, he was a strong individualist. This conflicted with his socialism, and when it did, his socialist beliefs lost out. He wasn't any Emma Goldman.
"In fact, his daughter Joan criticized him for that in her study of his life."
"I didn't know that,'' Farrington said. "She must have written it after I died. Did you know much about her, what happened to her after London died, how she died?"
"I knew a London scholar who knew her well," Peter said.
Actually, the scholar had only corresponded with her a little and had met her briefly. Peter didn't mind exaggerating if it would get him a berth on the ship.
"She was a very active Socialist. She died in 1971, I think. Her book about her father was very objective, especially considering that he had divorced her mother for a younger woman.
"Anyway, I think that London wanted to be a Wolf Larsen because that would have made him insensitive to the world's woes. A man who doesn't feel for others can't be hurt himself. At least, he thinks he can't. Actually, he's hurting himself.
"London may have realized this and was, in fact, trying to put this idea across. At the same time, he wished to be a Larsen, even if this meant being frozen inside, that is, a superbrute. But writers have countercurrents in their psychic sea, as all humans do. That's why, when the critics have done with them, great writers are still enigmas. When skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man."